Articles

Measuring Your Christian Faith Through Belief in the Unicorn; With Pictures.

Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? or will he harrow the valleys after thee?

Wilt thou trust him, because his strength is great? or wilt thou leave thy labour to him? Wilt thou believe him, that he will bring home thy seed, and gather it into thy barn? ...Job 39

Living as Children of Light

So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts....Ephesians 4

In the above passage, Paul is explaining that the Gentiles (unGodly) are in fact ignorant of spiritual things--but that Christians should not be. We should know how and by whom the world was created. Christians should know that we were created and not "evolved" and should know that there is a purpose for this life and a judgement to follow.

Christians should know and believe that the Bible is "God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness."

Thracian helmet. 3,200 B.C. to 500 B.C. University of Texas.

However, more and more, "Christians" are beginning to have the same doubts about scripture as the unGodly have, and this because they love to sit at the feet of the ignorant sopping up their "knowledge" and desiring to live as the "Gentiles" do. In the very recent past "Christians have been fired or forced out of "Christian" Universities for being critical of evolutionary theory.

Many have had their faiths weakened by the continuous barrage of evolutionary and materialistic teachings in our culture; hey, maybe God created the Adam and Eve and the animals through the process of evolution; maybe there was a creation Before the one we read about in Genesis where there were cave men and dinosaurs; maybe Noah's Flood was only a local flood?

Maybe Christians shouldn't be judging the truth of the Bible through the thinking of the very people their Bibles say is "futile"? Understand that we mean their thinking is futile in the sense that they are ignorant about God and His creation-and about saving themselves from the corruption of this world.

If the unbeliever has you questioning the Word of God on creation (in other words, if you start doubting the Word of God in the very first chapter), how long before they have you questioning the "virgin birth"? How long before you share their doubts that Jesus Christ was the Son of God? Clearly these teachers don't believe that Jesus was dead and rose on the third day?

See, God's plan is that you, believer will serve as an example for them--not them for you. His plan is that you by your faith and good works and love will be a light in the darkness. A tiny light can overcomer a lot of darkness. Will Christians continue to believe that the Bible is true when they're the last one's at university; at church or on the block who does? What will we do when All the really smart, good looking and wealthy people say "there is no God?

The Unicorn

The word unicorn appears in the Old Testmant, in the KJV a number of times. The unicorn pictured there is not the white horse with the long horn coming out of his forehead that we think of when we think of unicorns. No, in the Bible, it is clearly some type of powerful animal.

Many of the newer translations have baled on the word unicorn, in an attempt to keep the Holy Spirit from looking foolish, for clearly the thinking goes-no such animal ever existed.

Non believers have been using the unicorn as one of the "proofs" of the fallibility of the Bible and their attack, though fallacious, has "impressed" many Christians who also believe the animal to be mythical.

Science claims that more than 99% of all the animals that have ever lived are now extinct. We think that they've exaggerated quite a bit, but why isn't the easy answer for believers that in fact, the unicorn was a real, probably extinct animal? If so many species have gone extinct couldn't there have been a dozen animals with a single horn that could have been the uni-corn?

Clearly each writer of the Old Testament passage that mentions unicorns believed the animal to be real--so much so in fact that if the writer and the reader fail to see the same animal in their minds eye as he writes and they read--some loss of communication takes place.

Presented here for your approval is an artistic depiction of a one horned dinosaur from the Thracian culture. If in fact, this is a Tsintaosaurus or similar lambeosaur, could it not (along with any of the other candidates mentioned below) have been referred to as a uni-(one)corn? we believe that this represents one of the duck billed dinosaurs which was you'd have to assume wel known by both the artist and by those who would view the work. This particular creature, at its largest, could be seen looming over your roof if you were in the front yard and he was in the back....

One Christian on the Existence of the Unicorn

In many cases, the KJV of the Bible is a very elegantly phrased and worded. I, myself, still think "Our father, who art in heaven" rather than whatever the more modern translation is. This said, it is often a confusing text to read that is many times mired in language of the time.

There are certainly some mistranslations in the KJV that are more than a bit odd, and cause some problems when discussing passages with biblical literalists.

One quick sample of this is the mention of such beasts as the unicorn in the Old Testament. Now, today we all know that the unicorn does not exist - and yet, it is mentioned in the Bible. Numbers 23:22, Numbers 24:8 Deuteronomy 33:17, Job 39:9-10, Psalms 22:21, Psalms 29:6, Psalms 92:10, and Isaiah 34:7. For any students of Hebrew, the word is often transcribed to the Latin character set as r@'em, r@'eym, reym, and rem. Scholars believe this would be better translated today as auroch or wild bull.

For those Biblical literalists, I would not be surprised if at least one of them has come to doubt the Bible and thus the entire Christian faith based upon flaws that are perceived (and the non-existance of unicorns). This would be considered as leading someone away from eternal life in the Christian belief structure. ……http://everything2.com/

One Non-Believer on the Existence of the Unicorn

...Attributing the existence of everything to God explains nothing.

You wrote: “I merely keep an open mind when it comes to the existence of God.

I keep an open mind about the existence of unicorns”

Trouble is, there is no evidence about their existence. If evidence were presented, my open mind would welcome it. In the meantime, granting respect to unicornian and divine theories is absurd.

Belief in the supernatural (faith) is a virus of the mind. Tolerating such beliefs while not openly espousing them is not "being open-minded": it is a symptom of mild infection.

Tsintaosaurus

This strange duckbill is sometimes called the Unicorn Dinosaur because it had a long horn in the middle of its forehead!

It was such a strange looking creature that for years some scientists thought that the horn was a mistake until another of these plant-eating duckbills was found with the same feature.

Like other duck-billed dinosaurs, Tsintaosaurus had hundreds of teeth packed closely together to form what is called a dental battery. These were used to grind tough plant fiber into mushy pulp.

Tsintaosaurus has caused no small amount of debate among scientists, partly due to the poor preservation of its skull. The exact position and function of its 'horn' are far from being agreed upon, despite the discovery of two partial skulls and remains of at least four individuals..... Yahooligans! Dinosaurs

The Unicorn

Photo: Helmet tsintaosaurus with drawing of skull.(Tanius)

"There have been unconfirmed reports of aboriginal paintings of unicorns at Namaqualand in southern Africa. A passage of Bruce Chatwin's travel journal In Patagonia (1977) relates Chatwin's meeting a South American scientist who believed that unicorns were among South America's extinct megafauna of the Late Pleistocene, and that they were hunted out of existence by man in the 5th or 6th millennium BC.

He told Chatwin, who later sought them out, about two aboriginal cave paintings of "unicorns" at Lago Posadas (Cerro de los Indios).

Although they are generally thought of as legendary, there have been various unicorn spottings in many regions of Brazil……

Unicorns in Antiquity

According to an interpretation of seals carved with an animal which resembles a bull (and which may in fact be a way of depicting bulls in profile), it has been claimed that the unicorn was a common symbol during the Indus Valley civilization, appearing on many seals. It may have symbolized a powerful social group.

An animal called the re'em is mentioned in several places in the Bible, often as a metaphor representing strength; in the King James translation (and some other translations), this word is translated as "unicorn", producing phrases such as "His strength is as the strength of a unicorn".

This view is supported by the Assyrian rimu, which is often used as a metaphor of strength, and is depicted as a powerful, fierce, wild, or mountain bull with large horns." (Jewish Encyclopedia: "unicorn").

This animal was often depicted in ancient Mesopotamian art in profile with only one horn visible.

The unicorn does not appear in early Greek mythology, but in Greek natural history, for Greek writers on natural history were convinced of the reality of the unicorn, which they located in India, a distant and fabulous realm for them.

The Encyclopædia Britannica (1911) collects classical references to unicorns: the earliest description is from Ctesias, who described in Indica white wild asses, fleet of foot, having on the forehead a horn a cubit and a half in length, colored white, red and black; from the horn were made drinking cups which were a preventive of poisoning.

Aristotle must be following Ctesias when he mentions two one-horned animals, the oryx, a kind of antelope, and the so-called "Indian ass" (in Historia animalis ii. I and De partibus animalium iii. 2).

In Roman times Pliny's Natural History (viii: 30 and xl: 106) mentions the oryx and an Indian ox (the rhinoceros, perhaps) as one-horned beasts, as well as the Indian ass, "a very ferocious beast, similar in the rest of its body to a horse, with the head of a deer, the feet of an elephant, the tail of a boar, a deep, bellowing voice, and a single black horn, two cubits in length, standing out in the middle of its forehead."

Pliny adds that "it cannot be taken alive."

Aelian (De natura animalium iii. 41; iv. 52), quoting Ctesias, adds that India produces also a one-horned horse, and says (xvi. 20) that the monoceros was sometimes called carcazonon, which may be a form of the Arabic carcadn, meaning "rhinoceros". Strabo (book xv) says that in India there were one-horned horses with stag-like heads.

Sources of the Myth

The German unicorn skeleton allegedly discovered in 1663 A unicorn skeleton was supposedly found at Einhornhöhle ("Unicorn Cave") in Germany's Harz Mountains in 1663.

Claims that the so-called unicorn had only two legs (and was constructed from fossil bones of mammoths and other animals) are contradicted or explained by accounts that souvenir-seekers plundered the skeleton; these accounts further claim that, perhaps remarkably, the souvenir-hunters left the skull, with horn.

The skeleton was examined by Leibniz, who had previously doubted the existence of the unicorn, but was convinced thereby.

Baron Georges Cuvier maintained that as the unicorn was cloven-hoofed it must therefore have a cloven skull (making impossible the growth of a single horn); to disprove this, Dr. W. Franklin Dove, a University of Maine professor, artificially fused the horn buds of a calf together, creating a one-horned bull"....Source: Wikipedia

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